Tag Archives: Fuckyouazard

Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?
That is the only time a man can be brave.

-Game of Thrones

How can you be supporters when your team loses?
It’s only when our team loses that we can truly be supporters.

Losing hurts.

Always has, always will. If defeat doesn’t sting then did you really lose? If losing what you were fighting for doesn’t hurt did you really care? Do you really need it? Why did you fight at all?

Detroit City fell to the Bucks three to nil. Three. to. nil.

Saying it hurts.

It hurts to lose.

You might be able to tell from the pictures in the papers, but what I am saying is true. Detroit City lost to the Bucks. But what of it? We lost. Fuck the Bucks, we have a game to think about on Friday. We move on. When the team came over we embraced them (often literally). We chanted and waved flags. There was a party in Detroit and no one slept that night.

But it hurts. We bury that pain deep down, we look to better days, we move on. But it throbs at the base of our necks and until the next victory there will be nothing to cure it.

However, even in defeat there is victory.

The real battle is in the stands. Every article on the event can be summed up like this:

Dan Duggan’s Michigan Bucks beat Detroit City FC 3 – 0. They played nice soccer. But you can’t tell from our gallery of images because the Northern Guard show up, made themselves at home, and then chanted like madmen for 90 minutes plus stoppage. They were so awesome that even Bucks fans left DCFC fans. Kids loved them, parents wanted to be with them, and in the end that’s all that mattered. Because DCFC lost the battle but is winning the war.

Give or take 500 words.

We won because the battle wasn’t just on the field. It was off it as well. It was in front offices, in the stands, and in the minds of those there. When the Bucks show up with no sponsors and we have Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers; when Ultimate is decked out in Sam’s Hardware and Nobody Bank and we have Henry Ford Health System and Flagstar Bank. We have an official beer, an official bank, outreach programs, charities, and presence. The Buck’s have… well… they have a lot of silverware.

And let’s be honest – the Buck’s have a long, storied history… that no one cares about. What’s a history if no one reads it? Nothing. It is a book collecting dust on a shelf. Twenty years of obscurity and the best you can do is go on about how you never really meant for it to be a fan experience?

Yeah. Whatever.

Detroit City FC can walk out head held up high. We lost. So what? It hurts, but we’ll move on. We’ll remember this if we meet again. And in the end, the battle on the pitch was a small slice of a bigger battle. A battle of culture.

So fuck it.

Fuck you Daniel Duggan. Fuck you and your shitty fucking team and your shitty fucking pricing plan. Yeah. Don’t act like we wouldn’t fucking notice you dropped the price of tickets once DCFC wasn’t involved you two-faced price-swapping twat.

I’m not an author, but I am a writer and I’m going to talk about a pretty common topic/question that writers get so don’t expect anything ground-breaking here.

Anyone with a passion has at some point been asked “why.” Why do you write? Why do you paint? Why do you fix cars? Why do you go to work each day? Everyone has their own answers, something that drives them. It could be internal, external, a mix of both. A person might slave away at work for the family just as easily as an artist slaves away at a painting because of expectations.

There is a stereotype that sometimes people like me take cubical jobs for the stability and then everything is happy forever. Sure, the stability is a huge part of it, it is certainly nice to know that for 8 hours of work I’ll get 8 hours of pay. I got into a twitter fight with an “arteest” type who essentially told me all cubical jockeys were cunts who expected life on a silver platter.

Needless to say I no longer buy his stuff or go to his site at all.

But I digress. Engineering is a passion of mine and luckily one in high enough demand that I can use it to fund my more creative endeavors like writing and going to sports games in an increasing number of scarves. I’m lucky that I can enjoy going to work long enough to not go crazy. Not everyone is lucky like that.

Every economy has two sides: creator and consumer. If you are an artist and all you do is mock and bash middle America, your consumers, you’re pretty much a cunt. There is more to life than a pay cheque and day-in and day-out the grind gets boring. We look to artists to provide. I’m fairly confident that most people like me are more than happy to pay for escapism. Yet I constantly see creators complaining that we want it free, or treat them poorly. Maybe I surround myself with decent people but I rarely hear engineers talking about how artists don’t deserve to get paid. I rarely hear CAD designers talking about stealing music.

I do hear it from a lot of people who’d rather not resort to it. People who illegally download the CDs to afford the concert ticket. I won’t defend their actions, but I rarely see people download something because “Fuck the artist, man!”

And it is just that, people who spend five days a week in a cube often are the people who need and want escapism the most. Are the most willing to pay for that hour or two in bed next to a loved one reading a book or listening to Starbomb’s newest album.

My writing comes from a different sort of escapism. It was an escapism of school, of bullies, of social insecurity. It was also an escapism from what teachers wanted me to read. Dull, dry books that were better for putting young boys to sleep than engaging them with the arts.

Too often I was told I should read literature instead of genre so I chose to hate literature and create genre. I wanted to write stories about knights and dragons, about hidden languages and magic, about nations at war and getting the girl.

My writing filled a hole left by the constant demand of school to read things deemed “important” or “significant.”

Things deemed “important” and “significant” rarely contain dragons.

Just saying.

My first book is lost, it was last seen on a 3.5″ floppy. My next one was probably right beside it. Everything after that is saved. I have it on this computer I am typing on right now. That includes

An insane Harry Potter knock off if instead of magic it was ROTC on crack

A nihilistic sci-fi take on World War I set in space

A Forest Gump-esque take on vampire novels

Several dystopian war novels

A rehash of the nihilistic WWI novel set in a PMC operating inside western China

Several hundred ideas for a series of slap-stick short stories involving “Percival Mellowfeather” a joke shared among a group of friends

Project XIII – my successful attempt at NaNoWriMo in 2012

Project XIV – my unsuccessful attempt to turn PXIII into a real novel

Noortland

Noortland was something strange. Probably my first foray into “Dark Fantasy,” a place I am still firmly rooted. It is based off a particularly thrilling game of Civilization III I had back in highschool. It involved Lammert, a ranger; Alexandrine, a vampire rogue; Antonius, a wolfman; and their quest to overthrow the vampire King Constantine on behalf of his brother, Valentine – Alexandrine’s father.

To be fair, it was kind of shit.

To be honest it was total shite on a stick.

That’s where we come to Project XV, which has the working title “Sun-King” (and it is still a working title).

Sun-King is, in so many ways, is Noortland given new life. The maps are similar-ish, the settings are similar-ish, the characters are similar-ish.

Project XIII struck a chord with me, I knew that I wanted to write in a darker tone, I wanted to write from the perspective of characters that were not all good but not all evil. Like Noortland Project XIII was heavily based on an experience from a video game: namely that evil characters in a rail-roaded video game are still inherently treated as good. In my own case, my back-stabbing rogue who was an embodiment of the Void (death) was still treated as the great hero so long as I kept killing dragons.

I was infinitely amused at character’s willingness to trust me in story missions but on the flip side, essentially had to play two characters – my character outside of missions, killing and plundering all the way; and this second character, honest and trustworthy inside the story. So Project XIII was about two characters stuck in one body, one wholly good and the other wholly evil. Plus it involved Ice Elves, which I think are decently rare.

That was fun.

Project XIV… I don’t really remember anything from project XIV.

So in 2013, when I got laid off, I took a chance to start writing again. Having recently quit writing my serial, Baltikja, on the Paradox fora I had some free time and a willingness to write. A passion and a drive.

I wanted, I guess still want, to finish this.

From August 2013 to June 2014 I wrote Drafts 1 and 1.5. Draft 3 was written from December 2014 to January 2015. I documented some of that process here making sure to stop in just about every single day.

Project XV is Noortland re-imagined, re-invigorated, and the proportions blown up. It is written from my perspective, seen through my lenses and informed by who I am. All the characters are slices of myself or people I know. The interact with each other, with their world, and more importantly with me.

Because I don’t write for you, dear reader, I write for me. I write for years lost to reading trite that I despised. Years spent reading pseudo-intellectual new-age bullshit for the appeasement of high school teachers rather than my own curiosity. Years spent away from fantasy and genre and buried to my neck in things I didn’t enjoy.

So my apologies to Mr. Albrecht, if he is even reading, I liked your class. I liked working with you in theater.

But holy shit, to my English/Reading teachers in High School – fuck you and the horses you road in on.

I write, primarily, then to make up for lost time. So it is no surprise then that Sun-King involves Einar, the ranger; Rozenn, the immortal knight; Pallas, a wolfman from the highlands; and newcomer Gwennerch, a witch from a far-off land. It is no surprise that A work of my youth is finally so close to life. So close to publication that the younger me is starting to emerge again.

I have found new first readers. I hope that within a month I can begin the last bit of editing before I send the draft off to copy editing and then, maybe, start the hunt for an agent or finish putting it together for self publication.

If you have to include the exact words “yet another team” in your press release about yet another fucking team you’ve added… YOU’VE ADDED TOO MANY FUCKING TEAMS.

Consider for a second every other time you’ve ever used the words “yet another” anything. I’m guess it was negative. That’s because this is negative, and your poor story writer knows it. They know it. You know it. We all fucking know it.

Stop.

Just… just stop.

You rejected Grand Rapids, I think that one was questionable leaning toward a good idea. You turned down Real Ann Arbor Athletic Association Football Club United Town, that was a really smart idea. Then you let in FC Indiana because… not enough teams north of Indianapolis? Need to capitalize off the Indy 11 and Chicago Fire just a little bit more?

Come here. Come here!

National Premier Soccer League, come here this instant!

The fuck?

The. Fuck?

The Midwest is full. We have enough of these fucking “grow the game,” no fans, no fun, no smoke, crush the spirit of everyone around teams, that do nothing to grow the game but make it slightly less socially acceptable to support anything lower than first-tier soccer.

This league is full of joke clubs and joke owners who want nothing more than the satisfaction of wanking off to the idea that they own a sports team. That some how because they pay $10k a year or whatever and throw eleven college-aged players and maybe a dinosaur or two onto the field they are the next Dan Gilbert or Mike Ilitch.

They do NOTHING to grow the game. NOTHING to grow the league. NOTHING to become a part of their community. They are coasting by, riding the coattails of the few teams that actually manage to try.

Teams who know supporters, not soccer moms, fill wallets and seats rather than just seats. Teams and owners, who like their supporters, likely dream of a day when they can move to a league that doesn’t add or lose a dozen teams a year.

Been doing a lot of book stuff but very little involved writing. Mostly been working on my maps.

Brigid once pointed out another blog post to me where someone had written a piece on the sins of fantasy writers. One of the points made was essentially “Maps were Tolkien’s thing. You aren’t Tolkien. Ergo, don’t do Tolkien’s thing.”

I have several problems with this.

First. I love maps. So fuck you, random internet person.

Second. Their entire piece was “No one is as good as Tolkien” copy-pasted until it was slightly shorter than War and Peace, which is admittedly shallow-minded and also debatable at its core.

Third. Seriously, who died and made them king of fantasy? Fuck you random internet person who I can’t bother looking up.

Maps and fantasy go hand-in-hand. Our world has maps, why wouldn’t a fantasy world? Maps are a great window into the human condition. From racial segregation, to the pride of nations. From isolated languages, to internet traffic in every corner of the world. Maps convey history, science, sociology, greed, adventure, stupidity, and the power to unite. A map can show the lines than humans have drawn over centuries of bloodshed, or in an instant erase them completely and show us as fleas on the side of an elephant.

A map in the first few pages of a novel might have trouble showing that sort of emotion. Without an known history, a history linked to who we are, a map might fall a little flat. Someone from Poland is going to see their western border in a very different way then the border between North and South Korea. Even if they were too young to experience either of the wars that set them.

It is the job of an author to make people care about the little map at the beginning. Whether it is of a continent, or a single mountain by a lake.

But, in a more pragmatic way, a map is a great way to show scale to a reader. Without context a hike from New York to Chicago can be five miles, fifty miles, five hundred miles. We know that it is a long way to hike. But we know that through experience and from looking at it on a map.

I think that if you are going to drop enough place names – actual, proper place names like “Main Street” or “Edinburgh” or “Poland” – it is important to use a map. ‘Enough,’ of course, is the key word. Use your brain, I can’t do it for you. But if a character just walks from “home” to “the grocer” and distance isn’t important, yeah leave the map on the desk.

Hmmm, I’m think about that urban sort of setting. Can a map help?

Eh… I won’t say no. I love maps.

Just -and this is a general complaint about naming places- put some thought into your names. I read the first book of the Codex Alera series by the well-known Jim Butcher. The map drove me crazy because I recognized several of the place names and it took me out of “fantasy” world and put me more in the mind set of “this person apparently assumes I’ve never cracked open a history book ever.”

That is definitely something I’d avoid. Given that series was based on a challenge given to him to write something based off two “lame” ideas given by someone on the internet, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if some of the place names were after-thoughts. Still. “Aquitaine” is totally a place in France. Still is. Hard to think of it in a world of magic but that is totally a personal complaint; not bashing on Mr. Butcher.

Also, to the (other) guy on the internet who thinks Pokémon and the “Lost Legion” trope are lame.

As a game Pokémon is a lot of fun. If it is “lame” because it lacks depth or complexity, I’d say you are wrong (look up competitive builds and you’ll get the depth to the engine) and also having a less linear story/game-play is great for that an RPG. Wish they’d stop trying to shoe-horn their shitty writing into it.

The lost legion trope is fun, I wish they’d stop doing it with Legio Nona Hispana, that story is played-out. Honor and soldiery tropes, there is a lot to do there and a lot of things you can do to make it unique. Plus the idea of a larger, vastly superior force being ground to paste by a smaller, native population has some great historical baggage tobringalongwithit.

“But Nick,” you might squawk, “You grew up in Cleveland and then lived in the Detroit suburbs before moving into the the very edge of what can reasonably be called Metro Detroit! How can you claim to love Detroit?”